Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday March 19, 2013 @11:05AM
from the stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day dept.

langelgjm writes "In a closely-watched case, the U.S. Supreme Court today vindicated the first-sale doctrine, declaring that it "applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad." The case involved a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher's permission. The 6-3 decision has important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion (PDF) that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad."

There will be a huge push now for electronic books under the guise of "convenience" but what it really comes down to is that they will want to "license" the book rather than sell it. At the same time, the electronic versions will simply continue to make the publishers less and less relevant especially for new titles.

Guise of convenience? I'm pretty sure they really are more convenient, my room is rather small and I do a lot of traveling, I can easily break the DRM on my books so that I have backups, but with paperbooks, I'd never be able to keep as many of them.

It's easy to say greedy publishers, and to an extent they are, but unless you're in the habit of buying used books or live in a huge house, you're going to have to get rid of them over time anyways, but with ebooks, you won't likely ever hit that point.

Guise of convenience? I'm pretty sure they really are more convenient...

Electronic copies can be more convenient. But currently, they are not. Why are they not more convenient? Well let me see if I can find a source... Oh yes here it is:

I can easily break the DRM on my books so that I have backups...

If you notice, this person here has to run cracking software just to get their files to play nicely and not destroy itself if this person tries to do the basic tasks of backup or use on an 'unauthorized device'.

You see, they can be more convenient, but they are not. The eBook market is a minefield of incompatibility and artificial restriction. It takes away huge capabilities present in real books, and offers it back in a crippled/reduced capacity and calls it a 'bonus feature'.

Want to give your book to a friend? Hand it to them. Done.

Want to give your eBook to a friend? Well, first lets understand what format of eBook you have, which vendor did you purchase it from. Depending on the vendor, and their software, you might be able to lend it, but only once, or not at all. I'm not sure. Oh wait, your friend is using this specific type of software right? Oh he isn't? Well, guess you can't lend it to him. So he wants to use the software, hope he agrees to all the terms and conditions associated with the use of such software.

Am I exaggerating? A little... No wait, I'm not exaggerating at all, it really is a mass of incompatible formats, competing ecosystems, overly-limited 'rights', and flawed laws which make even your simple 'remove the DRM' action illegal (depending on how cranky a prosecutor is on a given day)

eBooks SHOULD be more convenient, but right now they certainly are not.

Honestly, DRM is the problem. Let's say that we have no DRM, but we still have different standards. Let's say we're talking about pictures, instead of books. Well, you have PNG, JPG, GIF.... Hrmm it appears it's pretty trivial to have one player that can handle all the formats when you don't have the DRM restrictions. The formats would need to differentiate themselves in functionality, or the best would win. The main differentiation right now is the DRM schemes.

Guise of convenience? I'm pretty sure they really are more convenient, my room is rather small and I do a lot of traveling, I can easily break the DRM on my books so that I have backups, but with paperbooks, I'd never be able to keep as many of them.

It's easy to say greedy publishers, and to an extent they are, but unless you're in the habit of buying used books or live in a huge house, you're going to have to get rid of them over time anyways, but with ebooks, you won't likely ever hit that point.

With a licensed ebook you don't have the option of reselling it. When you're done with those paper books, you can resell them and recoup some of your cash. If it weren't for getting screwed on your resale rights, I'd be on board. If the ebooks were like 50% cheaper than print it might be worth giving up on the resale rights. Unfortunately the ebooks I've looked at were the same or more expensive than printed books.

And based on my meeting with a publisher rep yesterday (I work in education, publisher was Pearson) the book is only "yours" for a year. Retake the course, or take the next level up course more than a year later, and you can't even use your "own" book for reference/refresher.

There are "open book cases" in my town now, think of it as some publicly accessible bookshelf where you put your old books and take home the ones that are there and are interesting to you. At first I thought they'd be plundered the nanosecond they are put up, but it seems to work out pretty well, and they see quite some use, too. One of those things is near the train station I frequent and no matter when I go there, someone's always standing there perusing the book, and people actually do bring books, too, not only take them out.

Think this through. Yes, ebooks are more convenient, at least for some, because of lack of space, etc. They are also usually cheaper and we are told because there is no printing and shipping cost involved. Right now, the competition for ebooks is printed books. When printed books go the way of the dinosaur, what will be in place to hold prices down? Yes, they will still be more convenient from a storage perspective, but not a cost perspective. What if your ebook textbook costs you $300 like your paper t

I don't think that it matters much what their motivations are, but rather, the stated rationale they give towards reaching their end goal (that is, shouting "eBooks are convenient!" when in reality they just want to lock that puppy down and circumvent first-sale doctrine entirely).

I'm sure they are convenient for both publisher (drops the cost of ink and paper to practically nada), and for many consumers (store it on a tablet!)

OTOH, while you may find it convenient and such, there are a lot of us old curmudgeons out here who prefer their books on paper.

The old-school books don't require batteries or eyestrain, no DRM, and the format won't ever become obsolete. Sure, they take up space and weigh a lot in quantity. So what? I've had a going personal library for decades now, and it's not a bother to me. I have this habit of upgrading the pile once in awhile. This means I get rid of the obvious crap (and any books I no longer have a credible use for), keep the good stuff (the awesome books I want to read over and over again over the years, old textbooks, etc) and over time my little personal library has gained in quality. As a bonus, no publisher or author can ever take them away from me - and not a few of them are even autographed. By the way, I can read 'em anytime I want, even when the power goes out.

Long story short - you go right ahead and chain yourself to the publisher's profit motives. I prefer mine on paper, and I prefer them to be mine once I buy them.

Err, electronic versions make them more relevant. Lazy college professors require you to purchase the online license from publishers like those in question(Wiley) because the website comes setup already with all the quizzes, homework, and tests preconfigured. This is basically standard in every university and community college I've researched in the past 6 years or so. It's too easy for the professor to pass up

Convenience? eBooks may be much, but convenient, they are not. Well, at least the ones that are for sale.

A dead tree edition is convenient. My buddy needs to look something up or wants to read it? Here's the book, return it when you feel like it. The only equipment he needs to read it is a pair of working eyes and the knowledge how to translate the printed symbols into meaningful expressions (aka "reading").

With an eBook, first of all the question arises if we have the same kind of reader. If not, well, there's a pretty good chance that he won't even be able to read it, even if I can give it to him, which is anything but a given either because of omnipresent DRM.

If you were talking about some kind of open document then yes, I could easily agree, they're very convenient. I have the PDF version of quite a few papers that I need on my laptop, and it's heaps easier to take those along when I travel. I can also easily hand over a copy to people who want to read them as well (before anyone asks, yes, I do have the right to do so). I can store thousands of pages that would fill a laptop case by themselves and have still lots of room for more and for other stuff.

That would be very convenient if it applied to other documents as well. But eBooks are usually not really like that. They are locked down by artificial restrictions that strip them of the convenience they COULD have.

They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.

You say that, but given some of their more recent decisions this latest decision is still shocking.

Would you care to give an example? There are a number of rulings that they made that I didn't like, but when I look at the underlying law, yeah, they interpreted it correctly. If you don't like a law, you shouldn't try to get the courts to twist or ignore it. Instead you should try to get the legislature to repeal or change it.

Btw, if anyone is interested, the dissenting justices in this case were Scalia, Ginsburg, and Kennedy. So a righty, a lefty and a centrist.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I suspect they were primarily concerned with the adverse effect suspending the first sale doctrine would have on currently legitimate business. Surely ending the first sale doctrine overseas would benefit the publishers, but it would hurt a lot of other companies too.

Plus, suspending first sale doctrine on imports would basically be putting a "Not Welcome" mat out for businesses located in America. Why would a business be located here when they could relocate to another country, import their products to the US, and have total control of the products post-sale thanks to no first sale doctrine on imports?

Not quite. They found that, since a corporation was just a collection of people, you could not restrict their right to free speech.

What they forgot was that the very existence of a corporation is a privilege granted by government. They don't even have to exist at all, and in their absence people still have the right to free speech. Since the private individuals that comprise a corporation still retain all of their individual rights when the corporation's speech is restricted, it can't be

Restricting corporate speech is not a restriction on individual rights. Permitting corporate speech is rightly considered as government assistance for that speech, and the government is not obligated to help you speak.

I think we can probably engineer some way to have both a free corporate press and restricted corporate political speech - but I'm not smart enough to say how.

How about we have neither? Free speech for individuals, and only individuals. A corporate press is simply too dangerous, individuals cannot compete with it. And I include the government in this too, the government as an entity should be making no speech at all, except for legislation and official policy statements. It certainly should not be lobbying its constituents.

They generally make decisions that are pro-establishment. Part of that is because the establishment has better lawyers (business v. individual cases) or the non-establishment is unsympathetic (criminals) or the establishment has some influence on which cases come up (if it loses in the Circuit Court of Appeals, the SG's office decides whether to appeal based on whether or not they think the case is a good test case--so the first circuit case for whether it's okay to record police officers on Boston Common, for example, doesn't get appealed because it's not a good test case for the government) or the justices have experiences on the prosecutorial side of the system and so tend to favor it.

However, they're also nine people looking at the law and making decisions based on what seems to make sense to them, in situations where the law can be read to favor either side. Kind of like where all of the courts of appeals had said that committing a crime "with a firearm" included even having a firearm in your pocket at the time a crime was committed. The Supreme Court overturned every circuit because it was an idiotic reading of the law.

Here, the law is more ambiguous--the question turned on whether a duplication in a foreign country, where the U.S. Copyright Act did not apply, was a duplication "under" the U.S. Copyright Act. Because duplications under the act are susceptible to the first sale doctrine.

But the body of law is frequently contradictory, and the Constitution is frequently vague. That give the justices a fair bit of latitude in their decisions while still being constant with the law. It is good to see them choosing to err on the side of individual's rights in a case that could very legitimately gone either way.

Since we're dragging the dead into this [c2.com], I'll say that the founding fathers would likely support corporate personhood. They'd probably have less concern for the rest of the Constitution when allowing it, though.

The debate over corporate personhood starts from a simple claim: If a corporation isn't a real entity with rights, then its contracts aren't protected by contract law. That means that employment contracts aren't valid, business-to-business contracts don't matter, and the only way for anything to get done would be personal contracts, meaning the CEO is personally responsible for the office toilet paper.

For tiny companies, personal contracts are fine. For modern small businesses, even, turnover may be high enough that personal contracts won't work. Sure, you can make that agreement today with the CEO, but next week the company could fire its CEO and your contract is probably going to go unfulfilled.

The solution is to give corporations some rights. Give them contract protection, so they can legally be a party to agreements. Give them free speech, so the government can't simply shut down gun manufacturers or publishers it doesn't like. Give them the right of ownership, so the company agents can conduct business without needing any particular person to be involved in every transaction.

Once you start granting companies rights, though, you hit the slippery slope... If ownership of supplies is allowed, why not copyrights? Copyrights expire after the author's death, so that means the company's death... in a few centuries. Individuals have the right to bear arms, so a company militia is perfectly fine, right?

As I understand, there was a lot of support in the 1700s for expanding business. America was going to be the land of opportunity, with resources to spare for everyone, so where an Englishman would be lucky to have a small shop, an American could have two or four easily - and each shop's employees would need to make deals on behalf of the company. Back at the framing of the Constitution, it'd be easy enough to designate corporations as limited entities, granted only a particular set of rights to allow them to function for commerce, but not to directly sway politics. Now, though, we can't touch the sacred Constitution.

Slowly, we're moving in the right direction, but we just don't have any codified laws to lead judges. Corporations eventually get judgements clarifying that they have the rights they need, but with so much backlash against any extent of "corporate personhood", it's political suicide for any lawmaker to try to define what's allowed and what isn't. Judges have to decide for themselves what's right or wrong far more than they're supposed to.

Corporate personhood isn't inherently bad. It's bad for corporations to be allowed to abuse the granted rights due to their inherent nonliving status. I know it's a more difficult mantra to chant, but easy mantras make for poor policy.

The issue of corporate rights wasn't expected to be a federal matter, so it's not included in the Constitution. It was left to the states to determine what companies could do. If it had been a federal matter, the Constitution's rules c

They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.

Yes, and that's why SCOTUS isn't full of conservative and liberal appointees and why you can't ever predict not only the final outcome, but the count of SCOTUS judges in favor or against certain cases because these judges don't vote along party lines. These are judges that vote in "favor of the law".

Quoting the judge: 'the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad'

I'd like to see this concept applied to anything that is purchased outright. If the publisher lost the ability to control what happens to the book then shouldn't Microsoft lose the ability to control what happens to an XBox after first sale? Modifying the hardware of something that you own should NOT be against the law.

The software that it runs? Not so much, that my friend is most definitely licensed and if modify any of it, including the boot software, you're in violation. I'm also pretty sure that removing the chip that contains the software and placing a new chip on still qualifies as changing the software that you 'licensed'.

As far as copyright is concerned, nothing. However the DMCA has very little to do with copyright, name notwithstanding. It has to do with technological measures designed to enforce copyright, and it makes it illegal to circumvent DRM except in a narrow range of explicitly states cases subject to periodic revision. Disabling the XBox DRM to run unsigned software is not one of those narrow cases, therefore it is illegal.

Since the digital-lock breaking provisions of the DMCA. Hardware mods have been contraband for many years in the USA. Ask any Canadian mod-chip dealer and they'll tell you they will not ship to the USA because they don't want to risk their livelihood. Granted, it's now also illegal in Canada as of a few months ago.

But they don't have to let you use their online service if your xbox has been tampered with, nor do they have to give you half the game if you buy it used and the activation code is used up. And consumers won't vote with their wallets on such an issue, the consumers in this case are pre-teens with more money than they know what to do with and no thoughts about anything beyond next week.

Legal questions aside, you could mod your console already prior to this decision. The enforcement to try to get you t

I'd also like to see it for things like software licenses. For instance, VS.Net Pro 2012 in the US costs $472, but in Canada, it costs $667. Amazon US refuses to ship this product to Canada. That's almost a $200 difference (41% more) per license. Things go both ways here. Textbooks are more expensive in the US, and software is often cheaper, at least compared to other first world countries.

It won't be for long. The E.U. high court's decision to allow the resale of used software (Usedsoft vs. Oracle) stated that giving a permanent license for an one-time payment concludes a sale, and the First Sale doctrine applies. Just because you name your EULA in a fancy manner, it doesn't change that it covers a sale. At least for the E.U., all ebook providers thus have to implement the infrastructure to allow a resale of used ebooks.

I think the issue would be that the DMCA, unless substantially amended, would make first sale irrelevant, not that fancy-EULA-talk would eliminate first sale in theory:

If my DRM system is sufficiently robust that you would have to break it(either to transfer the file to the party you are selling to, or for the party you are selling to to read/execute the file), you can have your precious little 'first sale' rights, it's just that somebody still needs to commit a federal felony to make the goods sold actually worth more than $0 to anybody who I don't approve(since the value of an encrypted ebook you can't read, or software that won't run because the authentication server isn't giving it the thumbs up, isn't very high..)

If somebody doesn't do something soon, we'll be seeing merchants of second-hand records and CDs and videos as well!! I've even hear rumors that there are some brick-and-mortar institutions springing up and collecting second hand materials and LOANING THEM OUT FREELY TO ANYO

Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?

I'm not surprised to see Justices "Whatever helps big corporations the most is best for the country" Kennedy, and "Whatever the republican party says today is the founder's original intent" Scalia writing a dissent, though. I don't know what could have made Ginsberg side with them though.

Even though I consider the second amendment poorly advised in a nuclear age, weapon(never sure why weapons that use a small explosive charge to propel a metal slug are particularly special in this regard) ownership is nevertheless a guaranteed right according to the highest law of the land, and I would very much like any court of the country to protect any individual right we have collectively decided is innate.

I'd personally like a supermajority of Americans to reconsider the value of the second amendment

So you do not consider the ability of the people to revolt and toss aside an undesirable government fundamental or good? Do you trust your government that much? How many governments in the past 10 years have required toppling via force and how many more need to go? Peaceful resolution of problems with the government is obviously preferable to armed revolt, but what do you do when peaceful solutions do not work? What do you do when dissidents become criminalized and people begin to disappear?

The intent was that the government would be unable to deny private citizens the right to own and carry weapons equivalent to those that the members of a standing army would carry. There aren't many gun-rights advocates who would argue that the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to own an ICBM, for example (although the unrestricted private ownership of cannon and armed ships in that period provides the basis for the argument that private ownership of any weapon a standing military employs is protec

"Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?"

Yes, it did. BUT, you're wrong about one thing. It isn't the "physical product" that is at issue here. it's the copyrighted work.

This has BIG implications for copyrighted works. In essence, it upholds the 100-year-old rule that says publishers' "terms" bedamned: if you bought it, it's YOURS. You can sell it, burn it, or whatever you want.

Although lower courts have upheld First Sale Doctrine re: copyrighted software for resale on Ebay and Amazon, it was reaffirmed here by the Supreme Court.

So unless you have an existing contract with the publisher when you buy software, you can pretty much ignore their "license agreement". You bought it, it's yours. Once you have paid for it, you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "license agreement" inside the box or in a popup window. But you still can't legally distribute copies without the copyright holder's permission.

Yes, it did. BUT, you're wrong about one thing. It isn't the "physical product" that is at issue here. it's the copyrighted work.

he actual decision makes some rather insightful observations:

Things like :

noting your microwave has software in it, and that selling your microwave made in China would now have copyright implications. -- you would need the rights holders permission to sell.

ditto your car if it was an import, or perhaps ditto your car even if it domestic if the computer module component was made abroad.

and then there's the note that product packaging is copyright, so that box of markers in a cardboard box with a picture of a dog on it... well it was made abroad and you can't re-sell it until you get permission from the photographer who took that picture.

Wiley's desired interpretation of the copyright act had far far wider implications than just books, or even media. It would have affected practically anything sold with an an instruction manual, anything with a picture on it, anything with a picture on the box, anything with software in it...

"I mean, in all seriousness - I go to the toystore and buy a boxed set of Monopoly for $10. I turn around and resell it to you for $15, that's none of their business - I paid them the price they asked, legally."

Yes, the history of this is interesting. The manufacturers of just about every kind of product in existence, at one time or another, has tried to put restrictions on the after-sale use of their products. Even hammers and shovels. They tried putting "agreements" on the labels, inside and outside the packages, etc. The courts ruled, in EVERY case except (recently) software, that if you walk into a retail store (or mail order), and plunk down your money, it is YOURS and you can do whatever you want with it, regardless of any "agreement" on or in the package.

The only reason software has been an exception has been corporate lobbying. And I'd sure like to see that go away. I don't understand why software should be any different from any other copyrighted work. And in fact it wasn't, until pretty recently.

A little more than 100 years ago, software became common, in the form of those paper rolls of music for player pianos. They are software, in every real sense. Publishers didn't like that people were copying them with paper punches. (Sound familiar? That's what Bill Gates took exception to when his company sold a BASIC interpreter for the Altair on paper tape.) And they tried to put restrictions on their use after first sale, arguing that they were different from other published works, because they controlled a machine. The courts said no. The form of the work didn't matter. Paper rolls with holes in them were nothing more than a different form of the published sheet music.

So what's different with today's software? Nothing. Software is also a written work. Some coder(s) had to sit down and write it. And yes, it might control a machine (a computer), but so did player piano rolls, and punch cards for looms 200 years ago. Same same.

Remember the 5-4 decision saying that the government could take your house, give you a few bucks for it, and then hand the land over to someone with a business plan to build a mall? That was all "conservative" justices in the 4, with the swing siding with the "liberals" for the majority.

Oh, no, this isn't a liberal/conservative thing. It's a hating Scalia and Kennedy thing. I know you could get that impression from the fact that I was accusing Scalia of being a republican lapdog, but that's just his particular method of being terrible. The man seems intent on attacking/defending things in court on a strictly partisan basis.

Jobs and economy are not a banner under which businesses can steamroll our rights as citizens to choose whether or not we sell our home. They want my property? They offer what they believe it's worth. If I think it's worth more, then they're shit out of luck, and should maybe try offering more money.

Being a corporation and 'job-creator' does not exempt you from playing by the rules the rest of us play by.

"i kan reed" might want to start by reading the linked opinion. The document contains not only the majority opinion, but the dissenting opinion(s) as well. In this case, it was authored by Justice Ginsberg.

This may be one of the most important decisions this court has gotten right in years. This was absolutely huge because of the implications of what would have happened if it had gone the other way. This is critical in terms of the idea of actually owning what you buy, without this manufactures could simply make things out of country and avoid first sale rights. This could have affected pretty much every aspect of Americans daily life and is a good first step in restoring Intellectual Property sanity.

It's funny how property rights have historically been a right wring agenda item until they are shown to be just as important to the left as well...

The majority opinion was written by Justice Stephen Breyer and he was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas. The majority opinion was that you loose control when you sell something. Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Samuel Alito said that congress was free to change the law if they wanted, but sided with the majority.
The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia.

Many here do not understand event the definition of capitalism:private ownership and operation of propertythat's all it is.

Denying people's right to private ownership and operation of property is denying capitalism. It's a good thing that this judge went in the right direction, but what is troubling is that this was ever even a question: can people own property?

Can people own and operate private property? Can you sell your own stuff that you made or bought? Isn't that a strange thing to ask in a society that is supposedly capitalist? But of-course it is not a strange thing to ask, because the society is no longer capitalist. Capitalism really exists as a concept in a free market economy, because capitalism in fact requires individual freedom. Denying freedom to the individuals will automatically deny capitalism and what do you have when you do not have capitalism because you do not have freedom?

Well, you may still end up with some people owning and operating private property but not all people being able to do it, because the governing principles changed to deny all people equal protection against government intervention by law.

It is when you do not have equal treatment of people in the context of their relationship with their government by law when you really no longer have free market but you also lose the principles of capitalism for most people.

Again: capitalism is ownership and operation of private property. This is a basic fundamental right, all other rights are only an extension of this one right. If you have no right to own and operate private property, you will not be able to have resources, you will not even be allowed to own and operate your own body. And that's true even today, look at this lack of capitalism, lack of free market and thus lack of freedom even to do what you want with your own body. All these government officials telling you what you must or are not allowed to do, eat, smoke, drink, ingest, who you can and cannot have sex with, etc.

Unfortunately it is now news when a judge actually protects individual freedoms in a rare case of outbreak of common sense or decency or something like that, it's no longer the rule, it's the exception.

The breakdown of votes is very different to what I'm used to seeing on Supreme Court cases – you've got Breyer, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan in the majority, and Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg in dissent. That's really weird; usually you've got Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts on the conservative wing voting together, with Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor as the liberal bloc. Kennedy is a bit of a swing vote, though he's gone more with the conservatives recently, and Scalia used to occasionally vote with the liberals on civil liberties cases, but he doesn't any more and is now pretty much an elderly partisan crank. Roberts occasionally crosses the line (as with the decision upholding PPACA) but it's rather unusual to see so much intermixing between the liberal and conservative blocs.

Just goes to show that copyright as a political issue doesn't neatly break down along existing partisan lines.

The federal government protects the profits of big pharma by banning the re-importation of medications and medical devices sold in other countries. Hopefully this ruling sets a precedent for a challenge to that ridiculous prohibition. There's no valid reason that a drug should sell for $X in the USA and sell for a tiny fraction of that price just over the border.

Funny how the government is all in favor of "free trade" until it threatens some deep-pocketed special interest group.

I'm willing to bet that they sell the prescription after they fill it. Now its possible they have a doctor friend write them a half a dozen fake scripts with fake names and aliases, but that's a good way for a doctor to have their license revoked. The FDA requires doctors to have a certain level of safe guards in place to prescribe a serious quantity of prescription pain meds. Now I suppose they could be writing a bunch of small prescriptions for 10 or 15 pills here and there, but the FDA tracks all thos

It kinda surprises me how many "smart people" don't seem to realize that developing a heroin addiction isn't going to do shit to fix whatever's causing you pain.

It's kind of surprising home many smart people think that doctors and chiropractors can do anything for certain types of neck and back problems. I have a friend who hurt her back playing college basketball. She had 4 surgeries that just made her back worse every time. She takes narcotics because she needs something for the pain. Otherwise she'd probably want to kill herself. Is she an addict? Certainly. But you can't take narcotics long term without becoming physically addicted. It is physiologically

This is already the case. During my grad studies, only 20% of foreign editions were identical. The rest had either wrong page numbers or different questions (sometimes very similar questions with just a different set of numbers).

1: there is a very large and not particaully rich country called india where english is one of the official languages (the other being hindi but afaict that isn't used much for technical stuff)2: some countries deliberately establish english speaking universities in the hope of being more attractive to foreign talent.3: Even in the UK which is english speaking and fairly rich afaict there is far less tolerance and pushing of overpriced textbooks than in the USA.

Put all of these together and at a university level there is going to be a pretty big market for textbooks in english outside the USA and in general those outside america aren't prepared to pay as much as those inside america. The textbook vendors want to split the market so they can choose a different "most profitable price" for the USA and the rest of the world.

It's funny -- there are all kinds of incentives for big business to move jobs offshore, or import cheap labor, but when the general public makes use of the same process, they complain. And they got 3 judges on their side, including a "liberal" judge (Ginsburg) and a lieralish judge (Kenedy) and of course Scalia. Expect a legislative solution to be purchased soon so that this "egregious" decision can be fixed and we can go back to falling wages and increasing corporate profits.

Legally it wasn't so clear-cut. The case hinged on the wording of the Copyright Act, which grants first-sale doctrine to copies "lawfully made under this title [the Act]." The crucial debate was over the word under. Wiley alleged, and the lower courts agreed, that "under" meant "under the jurisdiction of": since the books were produced outside the US, they were made outside the jurisdiction of the Copyright Act and thus not made under the Act. Kirtsaeng alleged that "under" meant "corresponding to the rules set forth in" and thus the doctrine applied. SCOTUS held with Kirtsaeng.

First sale rights are not something that should depend on a statute to begin with. They should be a self-evident aspect of personal property right that are so taken for granted that they aren't explicitly stated anywhere.

I know people who used to take Levi's jeans to Europe to resell them since they cost so much more there than in North America. People had been prosecuted for this by claims of trademark infringement, which is not the same but similar.

Trademark infringement is what shut down re-importers of cigarettes that were popular in the early 2000s.

As another poster point out you can read the opinion here [supremecourt.gov]. From what I have read of previous supreme court opinions they are fairly readable unlike the laws that are drafted. I haven't read this one but that may be a task for lunch time today. This is also the same court that ruled that something can be both a tax and not a tax within the same ruling so strangeness is to be expected.